ART. II. Introduction to the Literature of is much, on the other hand, in its unity and coherence-in its being woven, as it were, in one woof, or cast in one mould, by the finest and most complicated piece of mechanism which nature, or rather the God of Nature, has wrought in his omnific bounty,-a commanding and comprehensive understanding. character. We would instance the view of the philosophy of Descartes, of Spinosa, and of Hobbes, and in general the progress of metaphysical inquiry; as contrasted with the unaffected originality and acuteness of some of the observations on what might be considered the exhausted merits of Shakspeare and Cervantes. MR. Hallam has completed his work with the same industry, the same solid and masculine good sense, which distinguished his first volume. There is an obvious objection to the successful exe- Mr. Hallam, like Kehama, treads with cution of such an undertaking as a gene- firm step and secure footing at once his ral and comprehensive view of literature, various paths of literature; and it is one during two or three of its most fertile of the most remarkable characteristics of centuries, by a single writer; that it this work, that the most elaborate, and, would have been better to have left each as we are of opinion, most successful department of science and letters to some passages, treat about writers on such individual who has made it his especial various subjects, and of such different study. This, however, is met, we conceive, and counterbalanced, by some important advantages. Unless we are prepared to encounter the utmost length and minuteness, to which the ardent and exclusive votary might be disposed to follow out his own science or branch of literature, there must at last have been some supreme and dictatorial power to While we survey, in Mr. Hallam's compress the whole into a limited space pages, the literary history of a period, -to retrench, to re-cast, to re-model, to so long, so prolific, and so various, we decide summarily on the jealousies and cannot but yield to the temptation of inconflicting claims of each contributor, as quiring whether we can trace any prito the importance of his favourite sub- mary and simple laws of the intellectual ject; to proscribe the invasion of a neigh- development of man; whether there bouring province; and above all, to trace are any conditions of our religious, pothe mutual relation which the various litical, or social being peculiarly favourbranches of intellectual study bear to able, or strikingly adverse, to letters in each other. On this plan we might have general, or to any particular branch of had several useful works, with some sort letters; under what circumstances the of mutual connection; but we should imagination pours forth her richest treahave had no whole, no general and har- sures, or severe reason unfolds the mysmonious summary of the proceedings of teries of the external world, and of the the human intellect during a definite human mind; where poetry is best quickperiod. The example of the Bridge- ened into life, or oratory endowed with water Treatises is not without signifi- the power of agitating the soul; where cance. Though we might be disinclined history registers, in undying language, to submit the volumes of Whewell or the acts of men and the events of the Buckland to the supremacy of some one world; where political science sheds its perhaps far less profoundly versed in brightest light on human affairs, or phiastronomy or geology; though the more losophy either stoops to our practical minute and subtle investigations of Roget duties, or soars to the first principles of might lose much, both of interest and things; or even where religion, or reliusefulness, by compression or retrench-gious literature, exalts and purifies the ment; yet who, on surveying the long heart, while it disdains not the alliance array of volumes on this high and solemn, of man's highest reason. In a word, is yet after all simple, argument, does not there any uniformity or regularity in the wish that some strong and masterly hand progress of mental improvement ?-or had been employed to mould them into do great intellects break out casually, one great 'Natural Theology,' with a and, if we may so say, accidentally separate chapter, by Mr. Babbage's liberal triumph, by the force of genius and inpermission, for the ninth? So in the literary history of these centuries, if we should gain in fulness and in authority by this division of literary labour, there tellectual energy, over all impediments and difficulties, and force an unprepared and uncongenial age to their acceptance, and to admiration? At first sight, on these points, all is it is heaven's lightning, which shines perplexity, confusion and contradiction. from the east to the west, yet no one Dante is born amid the fierce conflicts and knoweth whence it cometh or whither it the civil animosities of the free Italian re- goeth. In Tasso it may be considered publics; Ariosto and Tasso flourish at the (but how rare is this,) in some degree an courts of petty princes, or under the mag- hereditary appanage. Torquato may be nificent despotism of the Papacy during considered as cradled in poetry, by the that glorious age of art and letters. The example of his father Bernardo, who, Reformation appears either to exhaust or however, did not much encourage the to blast the intellect of Germany to bar- child that was so completely to eclipse renness, or at least to extinguish her his own name. It suddenly breaks out vernacular literature-(from Luther's in one of a parcel of deer-stealing youths, Bible to Lessing and Herder there is of undistinguished name and parentage, little more than a dull blank),-while it in a rural county in England it seizes seems to summon into life our Elizabeth- on Burns at his plough. Philosophy an poets and philosophers-our Spensers, emerges from the cell of a monk-deShakspeares, Hookers, Bacons. The re- scends from the woolsack of Great Brivival of Roman Catholicism is almost con- tain-visits with its subtlest, if not its temporaneous, and no doubt part of the soundest, spirit of inquiry, the humble inspiration of the splendid, though brief dwelling of a Jew of Amsterdam-or period of Spanish literature, the age of works itself into fame and usefulness, Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon: it produced its vivifying effects on Italy; but southern Germany remained lifeless and unawakened. Free institutions have in general fostered the noblest products of the mind but for her more perfect prose and her best poetry, France must yet look back to the gorgeous days of the court of Louis XIV., to Bossuet, Pascal, Corneille, and Racine. While the literature of some countries springs up at once to full height and stature-a Minerva from the head of Jove-in others it is slowly and progressively matured; while in some lands it seems to exhaust all its creative energies in one brilliant summer, in others it has a succession of produc- There can be no doubt that there are tive seasons, and its prolific power seems many premature births in the mental to increase with the richness of its pro- world; and Gray is not far wrong when duce. One language seems destined to he thinks that many mute inglorious Milsucceed in one branch of intellectual tons may have been buried in village obstudy its poetical style, for instance, is scurity. Nature, no doubt, in her boundperfect-while it never, or rarely, attains less and untraceable prodigality, allows to eloquent or harmonious prose in much of her noblest creation-the invenanother, the higher poetry seems to tive and intelligent mind of man-to run want congenial words to express its to waste. The whole analogy of created thoughts. Here letters, arts, and philosophy seem to prosper from the concentration, as it were, of the nation in one large capital; there by its diffusion among a number of smaller and rival cities. from the cottage of a poor artisan. Yet it is remarkable how admirably timed. almost every great writer appears to be ; the man is born who is wanted for his age; in general, exactly the circumstances congenial to his peculiar genius conspire to develope his powers. Had Shakspeare been born before the stage had taken its form under Elizabeth, what would he have been? If Roger Bacon, or even the Marquess of Worcester, had been reserved for a later period, might they not have contributed most effectively and usefully to the advancement of science-have vied with the Newtons, Cuviers, or Watts ? things indicates this. The most powerful intellect, just as it arrives at maturity, sinks into the grave; and the baffled hopes of those who have watched the precocious promise of genius and wisdom are surely not always fond illusions. But All this is unquestionable; and it may it should seem, on the other hand, that, be safely assumed, that no age, no com- if we may so speak, there is always a vast bination of political or social circumstan- floating capital of invention and intellect, ces, no particular state of the human which only requires to be directed into mind, will, of itself, call forth a great the proper channels to multiply a hundred poet or a great philosopher. True geni- fold. Great occasions seem always to us springs up we know not from what call forth great minds; and that great quarter, what station, what parentage; mind which is best adapted to the neces sities and to the character of the age the clouds, a stirring of the stagnant wasprings at once to the first rank. Wher- ters, a manifest yearning after something ever any important question has arisen, undefined; many unsuccessful efforts to some bold intellect has arisen to grapple satisfy the cravings of the human mind; with it; and it is this happy coincidence failures which show the way to success, between the character and powers of the imperfect outlines and rude designs, the commanding mind, and the intellectual or pangs and throes of a great but yet imsocial necessities of the time, which mature birth. At length, the individual brings to maturity all the noblest and the appears who comprehends at once his own sempiternal works of human genius. Here power and the character of his times, or and there some solitary individual may at least intuitively feels himself in harbe discovered, mony with the demands of the stirring and yet dissatisfied age; and in one great work, or series of works, concentrates the invention, the knowledge, the poetry, Whose soul is like a star, and dwells apart,' who is far in advance-an unintelligible sometimes not of one nation alone, but of mystery to his own times, but whose pro- the republic of letters. He feels his diphetic oracles are read with wonder and vine mission, and his mission is acknowreverence by late posterity. But these ledged. exceptions prove rather than call in ques- At the period at which Mr. Hallam's tion the general law; and the fact, that second volume commences, the latter half they were perfectly obscure to their own of the sixteenth century, the strong and generation, and are read not without dif- governing impulses of the European inficulty, as is almost always the case, by tellect were the yet imperfect, or at least later ages, shows that there has been far from general, revival of classical learnstill something wanting to their full and ing, the Reformation, and the vigorous perfect development. reaction of Roman Catholicism in south Nothing, perhaps (excepting of course ern Europe. Italy was the acknowledged the invention of printing), has so power-parent both of the poetry and the general fully contributed to the richness of mo- literature of Christendom; Dante, Pedern literature as the infinite variety, the trarch, and Ariosto, stood almost alone constant vicissitudes in the political and as the vernacular poets of Europe-(the social state of the different nations of Eu- Nibelungen of the Germans, and the Cid rope. In the literature of each land, as of Spain, belonged to a passed age, and in a mirror, we behold these perpetual our own Chaucer, with all his inimitable changes the intervals of excitement and humour, invention, and sweetness, was repose of restless activity, and torpid fettered in his influence by the yet rude stagnation-of vigorous exertion, and the and imperfect state of the English lanlassitude of exhaustion-the succession guage). In the revival of letters, Italy of more imaginative or more severely- had asserted the same priority, if not prereasoning periods. As one nation, or one language, after maintaining the lead for a short time, drops behind in the glorious race, another starts to the front, sometimes springs far a-head of its wondering contemporaries, or, severely pressed by the emulation of others, hardly keeps its ground. eminence, with her Ficinus, Politian, and other well-known names. But in this latter department, the more polished, and gradually servilizing Italy began to shrink from her bold Platonic reveries, and that ardent homage to classical literature, which for a short period was her religion, and, in fact, set itself above her ChristiIn general, we think it may be assumed, anity; she began to stoop to the cultivanot indeed as an universal law, but as the tion of mere style, to limit her timid amusual course of things, that it is after the bition to purity of diction, and harmony first violent impulse produced by the in- of Latin period. In the mean time, the troduction of a new tone of opinion and more masculine and independent transalsentiment; after a period of agitation and pine mind followed up the study of the excitement, from a sudden or gradual classics with unwearied industry. Even change in the political or social state of in Latin style, perhaps, after all, Muretus, the country, that the individual arises and the other finished scholars of this who, in poetry or prose, in imaginative riod in Italy, never reached the ease and excellence or in philosophy, becomes the idiomatic, if perhaps less rigidly correct, organ and the representative of the new flow of Erasmus; while, in the more solid state of things. There is a scattering of attainments of scholarship, they fall far pe below the Casaubons and Scaligers of northern Europe. ed diction, accomplished that which in many other countries has not yet come to maturity, in our own has been formed no doubt by the concurrent influences of parliamentary speaking, the bar, and the periodical press. Italienischen Poesie '), in which we rejoice to find a close coincidence with our own views of the influence which gave its peculiar form and character to the Jerusalem Delivered.' Though Mr. Hallam has not looked upon it quite from the same point of view, his general sentiment is to a great degree in accordance with our own and with that of Ranke. It is remarkable that, while thus in the vain cultivation of a pure Latin style, Italy was retiring from the foremost rank of European scholars, from the loss of her independence, the enforced submission to But Italy had not completed her triumpetty domestic or to mightier foreign ty- virate, if we include Petrarch, her great rannies, the growth of her vernacular quaternion of poets. Tasso was yet to prose seemed stifled in its birth. Has it fulfil his mission, and take his place in ever, even in later times, equalled the the highest constellation of modern poetic nerve, the preciseness, the perspicuity of literature. We have just received a very Machiavelli? Excellent as are some of pleasing and judicious essay by Ranke, her historians in many of the highest the historian of the Popes, on the history qualifications of their calling-although of Italian poetry (Zur Geschichte der we cannot read Davila, Guicciardini, or even, perhaps the best in style, Sarpi; in later days Giannone, and we are disposed to add Galluzzi, without the highest admiration of their powers-yet more or less the same interminable and intricate prolixity of sentence, the same want of vivid perspicuity, of ease, of natural pause and emphasis, the same elaborately unfinished and inharmonious periods, chill our delight in reading them into a duty and 'The Jerusalem,' observes Mr. Hallam, 'is the a task. Many of their admirable political times. It was justly observed by Voltaire, that in great epic poem, in the strict sense, of modern and philosophical treatises labour under the choice of his subject Tasso is superior to Hothe same defect. Galileo stands almost mer. Whatever interest tradition might have at. alone, not merely in the matter, but in the tached among the Greeks to the wrath of Achilles manner of his composition. We should and the death of Hector, was slight to those genuine recollections which were associated with the at once decide that political independ- first crusade. It was not the theme of a single ence, with its constant practical inter- people, but of Europe; not a fluctuating tradition, course of man and man, its collisions of but certain history; yet history so far remote from intellect, and its absolute necessity of the poet's time, as to adapt itself to his purpose with almost the flexibility of fable. Nor could the commanding the popular mind by clear, subject have been chosen so well in another age or and intelligible, and striking language, country; it was still the holy war, and the symwas absolutely indispensable to the for-pathies of his readers were easily excited for relimation of a good prose style, if we were not suddenly arrested in our sentence by the thought of the great writers of France under Louis XIV. But, notwithstanding the enormous pedantry of her lawyers, and the utter want of taste in the more formal and elaborate writings of the period, we are inclined to thing that the more terse and animated and perspicuous form of French prose was at least commenced in the previous time of political faction and tumult. Many of the pamphlets addressed to the people speak a rude perhaps, but popular, and therefore direct and intelligible style. Montaigne, no doubt, with his unwrought, yet lucid language, contributed greatly to this result. And, as we shall hereafter attempt to show, the concentration of France in the capital; the manners of the court, profound in nothing, but aspiring to be brilliant in everything; the pulpit, which to its kingly or aristocratical audience could not speak but in a pure and polish gious chivalry; but, in Italy, this was no longer an absorbing sentiment; and the stern tone of bigotry, which perhaps might still have been required from a Castilian poet, would have been dissonant amidst the soft notes that charmed the court of Ferrara.'-vol. ii. pp. 268, 269. This great poem arose from the union of the dominant classical taste with the lingering love of romance or chivalry, blended, as it were, and harmonised by the strong religious feeling which had arisen out of the reviving Roman Catholicism. Tasso himself is the irrefragable authority for his own design of harmonising in one poem the nobler characteristics of the modern romance and the ancient epic; the richness and variety of the one, with the symmetry and unity of the other. Mr. Hallam has not noticed (we think they deserve a place in the history of literature) either the prose works, or the very sweet and graceful minor poems of Tasso. In his prose writings, the author of the Jerusalem has himself explained the philosophy of his poem. The tender charm-while the total failure of the and sensitive temperament of Tasso, other is attributable to the ill-chosen subwhich turned away in unconquerable re-ject, the servile imitation of Homer, the pugnance from the study of the law, ap- want of life, originality, and truth, not to plied itself with the severest study to the the more simple and classical construcprinciples of poetical criticism. An epic tion of the fable. poet at the age of eighteen, his Rinaldo The subject chosen by Tasso for his had already something of the union of great poem, combined with singular felichivalrous interest and adventure with a city the truth of history with the richest simpler fable. But in his discourse on fiction. It lay in a period in which histoheroic poetry, which M. Ranke assigns to ry itself was romance; in which the the twenty-first year of his age (A.D. wildest adventures of chivalry mingled 1564),* Tasso developed the whole the- with the vivid realities of life; its scene ory of his poetical design. After an elo- was placed in that marvellous East, indequent description of the variety and unity pendent of its sacred associations, so ferof the world, he proceeds, So do I con- tile in wonder-in which the imagination ceive that by an excellent poet, who is of Europe had long wandered-among called divine for no reason but because the courts of gorgeous satraps and sulhe resembles in his work the Supreme tans-in battle-fields where the turbaned Artificer, a poem might be formed, in and misbelieving hosts swarmed in mywhich, as in a little world, might be read, riads-the realms of boundless wealth, of here the array of armies; here battles by pride, of magic, of seductive beauty, and land and sea, sieges, skirmishes, single of valour which made its chieftains worcombats, joustings; here descriptions of thy antagonists of the noblest chivalry: famine and of drought, tempests, confla- above all, it was a war of religion, it was grations, prodigies; there might be found Christendom arrayed against Mohamme the councils of celestial and infernal be- danism, the cross against the crescent, ings, seditions, wanderings, chances, en- the worshipper of Christ against, as he was chantments; there deeds of cruelty, of strangely called, the heathen and idoladaring, of courtesy, of generosity; there trous Saracen. It was in this severe and love-adventures, happy or unhappy, joy- solemn spirit, which the revival of Roman ous or melancholy; yet, nevertheless, Catholicism had spread almost throughthe poem which comprehends this variety out Italy, that Tasso conceived and acmight be one, one in form and spirit; and complished his poem. The age would that all these things should be arranged no longer have endured, the strengthenin such a manner as to have a mutual re-ed Church would have sternly proscribed, lation and correspondence, a dependence had it not already been in possession of either of necessity or of verisimilitude the popular mind, the free and mocking upon each other, so that one part either taken away, or changed in its position, would destroy the unity of the whole.' Throughout this discourse and the next, on the art of poetry, the two standing examples, to which Tasso appeals, are the Orlando of Ariosto and the Italia Liberata of Trissino; and he constantly argues that it is not the irregularity of the former, but its inexhaustible interest, its vivid delineation of character, its unfailing poetry, that forms its lasting and irresistible irony of Pulci-or even that from which it was too late to disenchant the enamoured ear, the gayer, more voluptuous Ariosto. It was, in fact, this earnest religious feeling which was the inspiration of Tasso, and working to excess upon his morbid and distempered spirit, darkened the noonday of his life with the deepest misery. Tasso had been educated in a school of the Jesuits, that order which was now in the first outbreak of its fer vent piety and zealous intolerance. He had received the sacrament at nine years There appears to us some difficulty as to the date of the Discorso.' M. Ranke observes, that old, and though comprehending little Tasso was the first productive genius who set out of the mystic significance of that holy from a mature and perfect theory to its accomplish. rite, his heart had been profoundly imment in a great poem. Yet there are some ex-pressed by the majesty of the scene and pressions at the beginning of the Discorso' which appear to intimate that it was written after the poem had been begun. It was published much later, but Tasso asserts that he had made few additions to his original treatise :-Laquale io com. posi in pochi giorni e molti anni prima che io ripigliassi il poema tralasciato nel terzo o nel quarto canto' (Opere di Tasso, t. xii. p. 8, edit. 1823). of the place, the preparation, the visible emotion of the communicants, who stood around with deep suppressed murmurs, The hatred of unbelief and heresy, minor beating their breasts with their hands. gled up with all this deep religious senti |